Chapter 96: Life’s Confusions and Life Sharing

Source: https://www.facebook.com/100063294665283/posts/760465862739896/

[James’ Origin and Today] Chapter 96 - [A student’s life confusion shared with my life] (01/04/2024)

First of all, I would like to thank you for your hard work and continuous promotion of investment ideas over the years:

The stock market has been ups and downs in the past few years, because your investment philosophy has made me have a healthier mentality. I will not panic and stop losses when the stock market falls, nor will I be greedy and add more money when the stock market rises.

After constant verification, I know that following your investment steps can ultimately ensure a safe retirement life, so I understand that you always say at the end: The rise or fall of the market has nothing to do with me...

I want to ask you about your plans for the rest of my life

I am a 41-year-old engineer with two children and I work busy every day.

In recent years, I have become more and more irritable because I have no enthusiasm for this job. I just solve various problems responsibly, make the project go smoothly, and earn a meager salary every month to support my family.

I have consumed a lot of energy in the morning. When I get home in the evening, I have to take care of my two children. After the children go to bed, I turn on the laptop to prepare for tomorrow's work.

These days go by so fast, and in the blink of an eye I have entered the second half of my life, but I can't imagine my daily life other than going to work, let alone planning and making arrangements.

You have a successful career before retirement. I believe that work will take up most of your time. I would like to ask you to share your experience to solve my doubts:

1. Is your retirement gradual or sudden? Is there a period of discomfort? How to adjust your mentality?

2. I understand that you have many interests. How do you find your interests in your busy work?

3. You are in a senior position, how do you decide when to retire?

4. You have been promoting investment concepts for many years, which requires enthusiasm. How did you find it in the first place?

The above are my questions. Thank you for reading and looking forward to your reply.

My (James) answer:

First of all, when you are a little tired of your work and life, instead of leaving or escaping first, think about how to face this situation and relax first. There is no responsibility in the world that you must bear. You can wave your sleeves without any responsibility and easily without a cloud. When you have this mentality, you won't have much pressure. Let's take a look at the meaning of your life. If you can give meaning to your work, you will be happier doing it, because you are doing something meaningful. You are completing some work, serving your colleagues, and assisting your colleagues to complete their own work. When the products produced by your company are used in In many places, it can improve human life. Your work has meaning, not the work itself, so don’t look too narrowly at daily work, but at the great significance of your work in society. You have no responsibility or obligation to make things perfect. If things are messed up, it is also the company’s business. You just have to do your best, so there should be no pressure.

There are many stages in a person's life. I divide each stage of a person into 10 years. Each 10 years has a main life goal. For example, the 10 years from elementary school to junior high school, the 10 years from high school to college, the 10 years of hard work and marriage, the 10 years of working and raising children, and the 10 and 20 years of taking care of parents and accompanying them as they grow old. You are now in a working family educating your children for 10 years. Before your children go to college, you will have another 10 years of working families raising your children.

When there is one most important thing in every stage of your life, this thing is what you should focus on in these ten years, and other things are not so important.

Narrow it down to how efficient I am at work every day, or I need to balance relaxation and work efficiency. Let me talk about work efficiency first. I enter the company very early every day and arrive at the company at almost 7:30 (of course, you may have children to take care of, so you cannot arrive at the company as early as me). The purpose of arriving at the company early is to email all the important things I need to do today to the relevant people. As soon as they arrive at the company, they will see my email and start working. Hold one to three meetings to make sure that all work is carried out on time. My meetings are usually completed within 3 to 10 minutes, because I don’t want to delay their work because of the meeting time, so the meeting must be very efficient. If there is something that needs to be discussed, it is not appropriate to have a meeting. Instead, we can discuss a result individually one-on-one, and then hold a meeting so that everyone can reach a consensus. Instead of solving problems at a meeting, all problems have been solved before the meeting. The meeting is just for everyone to get the work and determine everyone's division of labor to execute it.

So the work efficiency mentioned here is to only focus on the three most important things in a day. When these three most important things are completed, I will get off work at six o'clock on time (I always get off work at six o'clock on time in Taiwan), and move the rest to the three most important things tomorrow. If I can complete the three most important things every day, 60 important things will be completed in a month. This is already a very efficient work. If someone asks me to do other things in the middle of the day that have nothing to do with these three important things, I usually won't spend too much time (unless it's an emergency, such as product design that cannot be shipped on time). If the problem is also very important, then I will move to the three most important things to complete tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I will not change the direction immediately and make myself busy like a headless fly. Therefore, I will focus on completing the three most important tasks. This is work efficiency.

If you are a leader or a supervisor, you must learn not to let the monkey crawl on you. That is, when an employee comes to you with a problem, you do not say that I will handle it, but you should use a few words to guide him to do what he should do, and then you will be fine, and ask him to report the results within a limited time frame. So don't let your subordinates or other departments throw the monkey on you. You have to throw the monkey back and let them execute it. You are a manager, you should not execute it yourself, you will be relaxed yourself. From your description, it sounds like your job is PM (project manager) or PLM (production line manager). You are a manager, not an executor, that is, someone who does not need to do it yourself.

You shouldn't be busy with company matters when you get home from work at night. If you can't arrive at the company at 7:30 the next morning, send out an email of the three most important things tomorrow to relevant colleagues thirty minutes before going to bed (I usually don't do company matters at night, because it will make me sleepless). When colleagues receive your email early in the morning, they will start to execute it, and then report the results to you. You can get off work the next day after you receive the report of the completion of the three things.

As a supervisor or supervisor, every time after a meeting, everything is arranged for subordinates or participants to execute. You are the chairman of the meeting. When you walk out of the conference room, you should not have anything that is your responsibility. That is, after the meeting, there is someone to do everything. Only if you leave the conference room without anything, the meeting will be perfect.

If anyone tells you anything, or in a meeting, many employees ask you about this difficulty or something, and your answer is if you say I will contact you and I will solve it, then you will have a bunch of monkeys on your back. So when it comes to work, remember not to put the monkey on your back. Never say, "I'll do it, I'll solve it." You should say, "Go and study and see how it's implemented," or please let me know the results of the discussion with the other party. It's all up to you to do what you do. Throw the monkey on others, because you are the supervisor, or you ask other departments to do it for you. For correct information, you can either ask him to contact the manufacturer to inquire about the results and then discuss it again, or ask the employee to draw the key points of the contract after reading it, and then use it to discuss the problems with you. Instead of reading the contract yourself, you can just focus on the key points of the contract to see if they are all written in the contract. This can save you a lot of work time.

When you are efficient at work, you no longer need to be busy with work matters after work, and you should be able to get off work on time. This is why I am actually very relaxed outside of work. Usually when I am working in the company, I will take time to swim and eat at the Alexander Hall (in Taiwan) at noon. I told my secretary not to schedule my meetings after four o'clock in the afternoon, because I will get off work at six o'clock on time. This is the way I worked at Acer, efficient work, and my work is also relaxed and happy.

As for your question, my answer is:

1. Is retirement gradual or sudden? Is there a period of discomfort? How to adjust your mentality?

James: My retirement should not be sudden, because I returned to Taiwan to work in the head office in 2000, but my family was still in the United States. My daughter was five years old at the time, and she was already nine when I returned in 2004. So when I returned to Taiwan to work, I promised my daughter that I would handle the company’s issues in a few years. After the situation is resolved, I will return to the United States to accompany him, so it is inevitable for me to work in Taiwan and leave to return to the United States. And I will retire because I found that I have reached the top level at Acer. If I go up, if I am not the general manager, then there is no other position for me to go to. If I sit as the general manager, it will be more dangerous, that is, I can go up. If you do a good job, you will never be able to get down from a position that you cannot get down. If you get down from the position of general manager, it will not be too honorable. The other most important reason is that I will not be able to fulfill my promise to my daughter to return to the United States to be with her. So retiring from Acer became inevitable, and I did not retire suddenly, but because I had already known a year ago that the time was coming. I knew that the time to retire from Acer was slowly approaching. At that time, Acer's career was at its peak, and Acer's business had ranked second in the world. It would also be the time for me to retire after success. The company happened to launch the preferential retirement plan for the 60-year project, so I directly applied for retirement and returned to the United States to be with my daughter.

In fact, we don’t need to think too much in life. There is a saying that when one door closes, another one will open. So I didn’t think too much, because I just returned to the United States to focus on being with my daughter, so spending time with my daughter became the most important thing in my life. Back in the United States, every day is to eat breakfast with my daughter, pick her up from get out of class, have snacks with her, play with her, cook dinner with her, and do her homework. I teach her math until she goes to bed. This is a normal day for me to spend with my daughter.

Maybe it’s because I just focus on spending time with my daughter, so I don’t have the so-called problem of not adapting. Of course, I will think about what else I can do. I have also mentioned in other articles that I originally wanted to study archeology at Stanford University, because I believe that human history or wisdom should be contained in archeology. However, before I applied, I entered the hypnotherapy and Ziwei Dou Shu courses. After that, I taught investment to Zi Wei Dou Shu students, and then established CLEC until now.

Maybe I'm lucky, because my attitude towards life is that I don't think too much. Even after I send my daughter to school every day, I go to Starbucks to drink coffee, read a book, and read a newspaper. Soon it's noon, and my daughter is out of class, so drinking coffee and reading have become my main leisure activities. So as a retired person, I don't need to do too much. Worry, if you have children, if you are financially free now and want to retire, then if you focus on your children, you will not have much other time and thoughts, and you will still live a very fulfilling life. If you read books when you have time, your life will still be very fulfilling, and you can slowly think about what you can learn or how you can contribute to society.

Of course, I ended up teaching investment for my second life, but you can also find your own expertise and contribute to society, or you can find a job that is close to home and has a relaxed job, and you don’t have to work nine to five. For example, teach children from disadvantaged groups to study, or see if there is anything you like. For example, working part-time at Starbucks, making coffee for everyone, is also a service, so there is no need to do anything, as long as you think it is meaningful and you are happy to do it. You can just do it, and many things will come naturally. If there are no expectations, there will be no disappointment. Just like when I teach investment, it will also come naturally. I have no expectations and no fees, so there is no pressure. Of course, if I want to teach, I will need to learn, which gives me opportunities to enrich myself every day.

2. I understand that you have many interests. How do you find your interests in your busy work?

James: To be honest, I am a very homely person. If I have nothing to do, I will stay at home and sometimes avoid parties and social activities. If there are outside activities, I usually go traveling with my daughter and family. Apart from traveling, my hobbies are reading and financial management. Of course, teaching is also an interest and job that I added later. So I didn't look for it in particular. This may be what Taoism calls "nothing", which is that many things are natural and don't need to be forced. When you force yourself to learn interests, it's actually not your interest. So cultivating interests is natural, you naturally like to do it, and you will start to do it. This is the natural way of Taoism.

So based on my experience, what I want to do every day is what I am interested in, not the big things or grand things I imagined, that is, reading books, swimming, and occasionally traveling. There is no need to have too many plans in life, and there is no need to have too many great achievements. Ordinary life is a blessing.

3. As a senior professional, how do you decide when to retire?

James: As I said before, the timing of my retirement was actually a coincidence, because I promised my daughter to return to the United States to be with her, so my work in Taiwan always had to end one day, and then the company happened to launch the preferential retirement plan of the 60-year project, so I took the opportunity to apply for retirement. It did not mean deciding when to retire, but one year before retirement , I know that my heart has quietly told me that the time is almost up, because at that time Acer's business has climbed to the top of the world, and my task is about to be completed, so I already knew that the day of retirement was not far away, but it was just the last step, so the company's 60-year priority retirement project was the last step, and I was not able to predict it first.

4. You have been promoting investment concepts for many years, which requires enthusiasm. How did you find it in the first place?

James: Teaching investment was something that was not in my plan due to fate, because we were studying hypnotherapy and Ziwei Dou Shu courses, and everyone always knew each other. They asked me why I retired at such a young age, and how you planned your finances. I said that I could retire by investing in stocks. Everyone was very curious, so they asked me to teach them investment, so this was not something I planned, but it was. It just happened naturally, so when I started teaching investment, my teaching content was only two hours, and I graduated after two hours of teaching. At the beginning, there were only six students, and I taught for two hours every month. From six students to 10 students, to 20 students, the whole classroom was full. After that, some classmates helped me find a venue, and more and more people came. This is how I teach today.

So when you like to do something, such as reading, drinking coffee, or managing money, you always have your expertise. When others are in need, you will be happy to contribute yourself voluntarily, and you will achieve another career. Of course, it cannot be called a career after retirement, it is just something you can do to serve the society.

I often say that the purpose of life is service, so the value of life is service. Whether you serve children, spouses, parents, friends, or anyone else, as long as you have the ability and the other person needs it, you can help. It is all service. Serving one person, serving a hundred people, or serving ten thousand people. The more people you serve, the more meaningful your life will naturally be. Therefore, this enthusiasm does not mean that you have enthusiasm and you have enthusiasm. You have to let nature take its course. You have your expertise, there are people who need to be served by you, and you have the enthusiasm to serve others. This is a perfect combination, both are indispensable. It’s not something that can be accomplished by forcing someone to do something.

I hope the above content can help you find a happy life.